Uncharted Waters » 2012 » JanuaryNews and analysis on the latest approaches in IT, to keep you on the leading edge... and keep you from being cut by it.2015-03-30T16:37:46Zhttp://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/uncharted-waters/feed/atom/Matt Heusserhttp://blogs.stpcollaborative.com/matt/http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/unchartered-waters/taking-a-journey-with-corey-haines-part-ii/2012-01-25T03:22:31Z2012-01-22T14:18:01Z

Last time I interviewed Corey Haines about his journeyman lifestyle — leaving the day job behind and travelling the country on a pair programming tour in trade for a place to crash and maybe “fifty space bucks for lunch, gas and tolls.”

We’re back for part II of the interview, where we covered Corey budgeted and planned for his tour, how the tour actually took shape, what he did … and what he learned.

Matt Heusser: When I went through a similar life change, I took at step back and did some very hard math — for example, how much I needed to make to keep the lights on, as a percentage of previous salary, then how much I actually spent, and how much I actually earned, over the next six months or so, until I got comfortable. Did you do an exercise like that? How did you decide that you could afford to go on the tour? How did you decide how long to make the tour? Did you keep your apartment or house? Did you have any income while you were touring?

Corey Haines: (Smiles) I know a lot of people who do those exercises. I’m not that great at it. I actually simply looked at how much money I had and figured that I could make it for a while. I didn’t do a lot of purposeful skimming back. Honestly, I just thought “hey, I have some money saved up, looks like a couple months worth.” I had a house in Cleveland, which was half-rented. So, I still had a mortgage to pay, plus other expenses. I initially was thinking it would be a quick 3-week driving trip before getting a full-time job. I quickly realized, though, that I was going to keep doing it for a while longer. It is amazing how far money can go when someone else is paying for your food.

During the time I was actively on the road, I only had one real income-generating gig: I taught a short “introduction to test-driven development” class. This generated a couple thousand dollars. Otherwise, I did my best to keep my visits just about room and board. My expenses were paid completely out of my savings. All-in-all, I estimate that December through September cost me around $20,000.

There were two significant money-oriented events, though.

In April of 2009, I completely ran out of money. Luckily, my tax return came in at the same time, so I found myself with a bunch of cash. That funded a continuation of the tour through the summer.

In October of 2009, I had lined up a couple month contract at Think Relevance. Unfortunately, at the beginning of September, I ran out of money; ran out like not having enough for my mortgage. I just needed enough to make it for a month to the contract; I had calculated it as $3000. So, I turned to the community and put up a “hat in hand” blog post, asking for donations to support me for a month. I had a good following of people watching the video interview series I was publishing, and I had met and spent time with a lot of people, so I thought I might be able to find 300 people each willing to give me $10. The response completely blew me away. Individuals and companies contributed at a rate I had a hard time believing. Within 24 hours, I had reached the goal of $3000, and the donations kept coming in. In the end, I hit a little bit over $5000. I was able to pay my bills and live until my contract. I vowed to take half of all the extra money and reinvest it into the community. I spent 2010 trying my best to do that by supporting and leading coderetreat community training events around the world.

Matt Heusser: Tell us about the trip. Did you have a ‘plan’? How did it pan out? How did you pay the rent? What was the tour like?

Corey Haines: Honestly, I didn’t have an over-arching plan for the tour; I just went with the flow. People contacted me, asked if I could come, and I did as much as I could with them. Even the idea of doing the video interviews came after I had left: I was about 30 minutes outside of Cleveland and thought I should buy a flip camera and do interviews with the people I visit. I didn’t know what we’d talk about, but I figured it would be interesting. Those videos ended up as a fantastic journal and view into a lot of the thoughts swirling around in the community. There are a set of videos called “Road Thoughts,” which are just me sitting at the side of the road sharing my ideas. These started on the way from Brian Marick’s house in Champaign, returning to Chicago. I was a week and a half into the first tour, and my head was absolutely bursting with thoughts. I had a few hours by myself in the car, and I just couldn’t contain myself. So, I pulled off at a rest area, set up my camera and just started talking.

As another example, in January, I got an email out of the blue from Anthony Eden, who lived in the Orlando, Florida, area. He had seen my videos (alongside the interviews, I had also started a video series called “How I Got Started in Programming”) and thought it would be cool to have me down at Acts As Conference doing some. I told him it sounded good, and I’d be happy to spend a couple weeks in the Orlando area pairing if he could whip up enough sponsorship for expenses (including flight, the two weeks would run somewhere around $800). I got an email the following morning saying to buy the plane ticket. So, I spent the first two weeks of February down there. I did some great video interviews, paired with some awesome people and spent a few days with Anthony and his family working on the product he was building at the time.

Wow that's a lot of stickers

The early parts of the tour were chunked into 2- to 3-week trips. For my summer trip, though, I planned a bold and adventurous 3 months of continuous touring, driving 6900 miles, from Cleveland to Miami to Prince Edward Island and back to Cleveland. I left at the beginning of May and got back home at the end of July.

The tour was one of the best experiences of my life. So far, that is.

Whenever I think back on my active time on the road, I find new and subtle things about it.

Some of the biggest effects were the result of the pace. I spent anywhere from 1 to 5 days at a place. I didn’t spend more than a week anywhere, as I felt that would shift from the idea of ‘just visiting.’ So, I might be at one place on Monday and a completely different place on Tuesday or Wednesday. Because of this, I had to learn how to drop in on a codebase and quickly focus on what was being done that day. When you have one or two days to contribute, you learn to block out the natural tendency to want to ‘understand the big picture,’ and just focus on the code in front of you. I gained a lot of experience of sitting next to someone, looking at their system and form a picture of what that particular section was doing.

Another important aspect was the fast pace of learning and teaching. Everyone had something to teach and was eager to learn what others had taught me before. So I got into the habit of learning something at one place, then teaching it at the next place. Sometimes the teaching was explicit, sometimes it was just part of working together. Either way, I found myself absorbing ideas and quickly sharing them, solidifying my own understanding of it.

What’s that you say? You want more?

Ok, we’ll have Corey back in another week or so to talk about his obstacles, how he overcame them, his advice for other on this path … and how he pays the rent.

In my previous article I interviewed J.B. Rainsberger, a sort of traditional globe-trotting-consultant turned early retiree living the life of the itinerant IT consultant.

His story is inspring, but even as I wrote it, I could hear the comments in my mind. “But Matt”, you’d say “I haven’t written a book, founded an international series of conferences, or have the cachet to command high rates for short-term consulting. What’s a guy like me to do?”

Meet Corey Haines, that’s what.

Corey’s story might be a lot like yours — leaving a large IT shop he was frustrated with, not working out as a culture fit at a startup, Corey found himself 35, unemployed, in Cleveland, in the heart of Ohio’s rust belt, in 2008.

Instead of thinking of how horrible life was, Corey took charge, downsized his life, and went on the road, conducting a journeyman tour of the united states.

By journeyman, I mean a traditional learning tour. He made plans to go in a loop over several states, programming with anyone who offered to provide him a place to sleep and some food. Corey was transparent about what he did, blogging, recording videos, and tweeting on the trip. (A couple of times, he stopped by the side of road and just talked. I found some of those talks the most interesting.)

After 10 months of doing the journeyman tour, Corey found that he had become working with programmers to learn new things — and he had a lot of new things to share. After settling in Chicago at the beginning of 2010, Corey started looking at ways to keep a free lifestyle while still keeping food on the table. One over-riding goal: don’t get a full-time job.

Nowadays, Corey spends his time between a few different projects: doing in-house development trainings at companies around the world; advising non- and less-technical founders of startups in the Chicago community; helping coordinate and sustain the coderetreat community and events; and building fun applications with his girlfriend, Sarah Gray, also a developer. All of this includes a lot of travel, as Corey ended 2011 with around 135,000 flight miles on Delta.

I asked him to share a bit of his story.

Matt Heusser: Let’s start at the beginning of this story. It’s 2008. You’ve just been let go from your start-up programming position. What now? did you have prospects? Did you have job leads?

Corey Haines: Getting fired was indeed a shock. I wasn’t happy at the startup, but I definitely wasn’t expecting to be fired. I came home in a bit of a daze and posted on Twitter that I was no longer employed. Luckily, it wasn’t long before I started getting messages from people interested in talking to me about possible prospects. That was very encouraging, allowing me to shake off worry about the future.. I had some money saved up, enough to last me a few months, so I decided to take a bit of time to relax and consider my options for the future. Perhaps it was time to make a real change.Matt Heusser: What made you think about doing a tour? How did you make the decision to pull a Nike and “Just do it?”

Corey Haines: For a few years prior, whenever my friend and mentor, J.B. Rainsberger, and I would see each other, our conversations would drift to the idea of traveling a bit Pal Erdos-style, just programming with people with little-to-no strings attached. When you think about it, how freeing would that be? As we make our way through our professional careers, it is easy to forget the reason that so many of us started programming in the first place: creating stuff with people. When I was a teenager, I remember periodically getting together with a friend and just writing code: no deadlines, no politics, no managers breathing down our necks. What if we took time to recapture that feeling?

When I lost my job, I realized that I was in a position to seriously consider trying it. A lot of my friends have told me they are used to hearing me say “I wonder what would happen if” and following up with some sort of crazy idea. The ideas don’t always have a concrete end-point or goal. Sometimes they are just an idea, a curiosity, about doing things a bit differently. In a way, this was one of them.

Over the course of 2008, I had met a lot of freelancers and others who worked from home. One of the biggest complaints I heard from them was the lack of someone to pair with, someone to pass ideas by. So, while spending October relaxing and recharging, I started formulating a bit more structure around the travel. I would travel around for a few weeks, staying with these freelancers, pairing for a few days, then moving on to someone else. Being fairly community-minded, I had a vague thought around starting up a freelancer pairing network where you could swap pairing hours.

Unfortunately, as I sent out a few initial feelers, I ran into a couple roadblocks. First, it was October, and people were thinking more about holidays, not about having some guy sleep on their couch. The other issue related to the network I initially contacted. Throughout 2008, I had spent the majority of my time involved in the local Microsoft-oriented programming community, attending a lot of local conferences in the midwest region of the United States. While the individual people were open to the idea, the companies they worked for often had problems with the idea of a non-employee working on the code. Companies using Microsoft technologies tend to be either larger or catering to larger companies. This definitely has a significant influence on their flexibility when it comes to having some random guy pair with their employee. As October was coming to a close, it looked like I might have to scrap the idea until after the new year. And then I went to RubyConf at the beginning of November and saw David Chelimsky.

I had met David for the first time in 2004, and we kept in touch off and on over the years. I would see him at the annual Agile conference and occasionally at other ones. Most of the time, I would see him coding, walk up and say “what are you doing,” and we would end up pairing on some code. At the 2008 RubyConf it was no different. I told David my idea about a tour, and he promptly said “I’ll be your first. Come to Chicago.” So, I had my first stop. Once I started making the plans, I had a couple other people contact me: Uncle Bob Martin sent me an email seeing if I wanted to stop by; then Brian Marick asked if I was interested in heading down to Champaign, IL, to spend a couple days working on some code for his book “Ruby Cocoa.”

After that, word started to spread that I was actually on the road. People started watching the video interviews I was doing, and more and more people contacted me, interested in having me come and work with them.

More to Come

We’ll leave Corey here talking about his first tour, then pick it up next week to discuss how Corey planned for his tour, what he learned, the obstacles to his success — and how he overcame them.

In this classic XKCD comic strip, we see a bit of everything: Humor, enlightenment, system dynamics … real life.

The term the author uses is “citogenesis”, a clever pun on “cytogenesis”, that actual real-life term for the process by which living things are created.

It seems that on the internet, and even before that, legends are born when respectable people or organizations make respectable claims that sound like they are true – or at least, sound like they should be true.

Comedian Stephen Colbert calls this “truthiness“, a term that, ironically, has made it’s way into wikipedia, where it is described as: a “truth” that a person claims to know intuitively “from the gut” or that it “feels right” without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.

Yes, some Wikipedia author put “truth” in quotes to indicate just how true it needed to be. (Hint: Not very much).

Citogenesis isn’t just for mythbusters; it can affect us at home, at the office, or out shopping.

Here’s how to spot it – and what we can do about it.

Citogenesis in the IT Shop

Consider, for example, the “Cone of Uncertainty.” It’s a basic project management tool, it is simple, and it makes sense. The idea is something like this: Early in the project, you have very little idea how long the project will take. It could be three months, it could be nine, it is most likely six. That is a 3x possible difference — and, if we are lucky, we’ll get the middle date. (Most of the time, we get the short one, don’t we?)

Again, the idea that the cone gets shorter makes sense. It is intuitive. It is an improvement over classic “make up dates and define success as conformance to schedule” thinking, suggesting a range of dates that we guide to over time.

What it is not is a law.

For example, have you ever known, really known, what it will take to get a project across the finish line, only to find out that you were missing something?

The server needed an Operating Systems upgrade, the database client wasn’t compatible with the server, the application was supposed to be real-time but it runs in batch, it doesn’t matter. Uncertainty doesn’t always go up.

Perhaps most of the time it does – on average, in something statisticians call “the aggregate.” A fair amount of publications claim this has been proved with empirical research — meaning using actual projects, not simulations. Empirical research is good because it’s real-world, but bad because there are too many independent variables; you need a lot of empirical research to prove things.

And that’s the rub.

One expert actually took the time to track down the data. Laurent Bossavit, who recently completed a term on the the board of directory of the Agile Alliance, tried to track down the research … and he couldn’t find any. In a shortseries of Google Plus Posts, Bossavit traces the history of cone idea, pointing out that it moved from one person’s observation and intuition, to be referenced by the next paper as fact, to then be referenced by a third paper as proven fact … and that brings us to the beginning of this post with me quoting an XKCD comic.

It’s not just the cone of uncertainty.

When I was a child, I was told the George Washington Cherry Tree Story as fact, and I believed it until my adult years. It wasn’t that I actively thought about it and had a deep faith in it, It’s just that it seemed right that a story about the personal integrity of a founding father should be, you know … true.

Likewise, while I have heard a number of leaders and executives giving pitches and presentations, often strewn with numbers, none of them ever said anything like “We’re losing money by the truckload” — yet several of them did go out of business shortly thereafter.

The fix for truthiness isn’t all that different. First, take a good look at the data – is it ugly, or is it presented with nice, clean, improbably-sharp edges? Is it presented as a generality or a law? If it’s presented as a law, where is the data?

If the data is in a previous report, dig up that report. If the previous report references someone else, dig that one up.

Once you’ve got three levels of someone referencing someone else, as Bossavit points out, we reach the “telephone game”, where we can expect that fair amount of nuance will be lost even to the author of the paper.

Why should we have to put these claims to test?

Well, for one thing, a great deal of modern astronomy rests on one man, Galileo Galili, challenging Arisotle’s claims that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones. It turns out that heavier objects do have a greater attraction to the ground (more “force” of gravity), but they a proportional increase in mass. Since Force = Mass * Acceleration, the acceleration remains constant.

It is a great honor of my life to sit on the board of directors for the Association for Software Testing, but, you know what?

It’s an interesting sort of technological apocalypse — you can see it’s ideas on the big screen in The Terminator or The Matrix; that eventually machines will become self-aware and rise up to rule over their human overloads. To introduce the subject properly would take a book; Amazon tells me that there are thousands of books on the subject, so I’ll make mine very brief.

It is also easy to dismiss Singularity as Science Fiction inspired by an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie from the 1980’s, but let’s dig in a little bit.

The most compelling observation I know of for the singularity is that Computer Clock Cycles and Processing Power keeps increasing, roughly doubling every few years in accordance with Moore’s Law, while we humans are at best, facing small gains over millions of years through natural selection.

The thinking goes like this: Eventually computers will catch up, have some sort of “divine spark” event, and go past us.

That thinking has been smacked down in the media: Right now, today, we could create a three-dimensional grid, 100x100x100 of the strongest CPU’s in the world together, something like the Department of Energy Project ASCI Red, and get a computer that strong, but we know what it would do: Execute instructions it was fed in serial order. The “divine spark” is a question mark, a huge one, one that can’t be ignored. Without it, we have no singularity.

But here’s the thing: We don’t need one.

The Turing Test

The classic test for artificial intellegence is something proposed by Alan Turning called the “Turing Test.” According to Turing, if you are corresponding with someone by, say, teletype or instant messenger, and you can’t tell the human from the computer, well, then, that’s artificial intelligence. For a one-sentence litmus test, I’d say that’s pretty good.

The first computer program that approached the turing test was probably Eliza, the program that simulates a psychotherapist. Eliza was good at taking any statement you make and asking you about it, thus “I feel sad” became “Why do you feel sad?” or “Do you often feel sad?” – Yet it was easy enough to trick Eliza into revealing itself as a computer program by using common idioms or terms it did not understand. (There are several free web-based versions of Eliza; play around with it yourself.)

We’ve come a long way since 1966. Today, one of the better-known applications of AI is to ask a question to thousands, millions, or tens of millions of people, and have the computer develop a set of connected ideas, called a neural network, similar to how the human brain works. Researchers have done this with Twenty Questions, and, under a very specific domain, you can get the computer to play as competently or better than a human. You can do the same thing with Chess, Jeopardy, and, if you have all the domain information right, medical diagnosis – though I can’t help but notice that a human still needs to sign off on the prescription.

And, with that, we have the makings for something very much like the coming singularity.

Domain Specific Languages Are Enough

You know that strange email you got from the person in Nigeria? You probably didn’t fall for it because it was just a little bit … off, right? Likewise, computer programs haven’t been good enough (yet) to create free accounts on websites because the websites use a CAPTCHA – The thing that scrambles words and letters so that only a human can recognize them.

But computers are getting faster and neural network programs more precise.

To have wreck major havoc, computer programs don’t need to become “self-aware”; they just need to get good enough to seem like a human enough to create logins or to send you spam email pretending to be a friend asking for confidential information.

In an era where out friendships and networks are increasingly public, publicly available, and available to programmers directly through APIs, that possibility looks increasingly likely.

Long before the singularity comes, long before the computer can be self-aware, I expect to have a computer program that can recognize words on a page better than a human, or fake being human enough to do serious damage to our technological infrastructure. Moreover, I expect a bunch of open-source kits to evolve that will allow people to run tests and target specific networks. (I don’t want to be too specific, but here’s one: Target a bank’s website by URL, simulate it, put that up on a server, send a bunch of emails in a phishing attack, then use the response to create more-effective emails. I know. It’s not good.)

The first good news is, if those things haven’t happened yet, well, we don’t have to worry about the singularity any time soon.

The second good news is, when those things happen, we will have an increasingly complex set of security techniques to offset them — often cribbed from the same technologies.

Your spam filter, for example, is probably a neural network, collecting similar emails in a “bad” list and strengthened by humans who decide what goes where. CAPTCHA’s aren’t cracked/not cracked in simple binary fashion, instead they are constantly evolving and improving. When someone develops and algorithm to break words on a screen even humans barely understand, I expect that we’ll move to idioms and audibles.

While it appears at first, that humans will be overcome with techno-savvy, I expect that the good guys will deploy their own tools and we’ll keep going, neck and neck. Your great aunt sally might get taken in by a phishing attack, sure, but that’s the same category of person that might fall for a nigerian scam email right now.

Today is 2012. It is unlikely that the robots will rise up to overcome their human overlords anytime soon … but keep your eyes on the bad guys who want to drive the robots. Those are the dudes to look out for, at least for the time being — and the career outlook for the people who do the look-out-ing are surprisingly good.

Last time I introduced my friend, Adam Yuret, and the story of this three-year boat trip from Seattle, Washington, down to Mexico and back. (Perhaps I should say, his one year trip, which he took three times.)

You would think this would sink his IT career, yet Adam, who has no certificates, no degrees, and did not complete high school, is doing just fine.

We’ll pick things up this week, to talk about how the trip went, how it impacted his career, and what’s next for Adam.

Matt Heusser: Tell us about the trip. Are you glad you made it? Would you do it again?

Adam Yuret: You summarized the trip well and much is written on the blog. It was nothing like we expected and we had many serious crippling mechanical failures, ironically none of which were the result of a 30 year old boat and all of which were to systems we’d payed handsomely to have a “marine professional” make “bulletproof” for us. That was a lesson in the “God Complex” cognitive bias, just because somebody claims to be a professional and earns their living for a long time doing something doesn’t mean you won’t do a better job than them just because you actually care about the outcome. This also applies to a certain famous person who wrote literally /the/ book on their marine-related field. We are both very glad we made it. At sea you bond with people very quickly, We grew our family by several people around the world with whom we keep in touch regularly and I suspect will continue to do so for the rest of our lives. We learned a lot about ourselves. I know you all imagine margaritas and tropical beaches but in actual fact steering a sailboat by hand loses it’s majesty after the 36th straight hour in mountainous pacific swell and heavy wind and rain in an open (uncovered) cockpit. When you turn on your motor and wonder what that noise was just to discover that the guy who built the mounts for it screwed up and the 500lb diesel motor has jumped off it’s mounts causing your propeller shaft to shear it’s set screws and is about to slide out the 1″ hole in the boat under the water which will potential cause you to sink 30 miles off the coast of nowhere Baja Mexico.

But you climb into a tiny space over sharp pointy battery boxes and attach a hose clamp to keep the shaft from leaving the boat. Then you lose all your wind and spend 3 days drifting 30 miles (average speed is usually about 100 miles every 24 hours). and when you finally get where you’re going you have a very broken engine and have to spend many hot days bloodying your knuckles trying to put it all back together. I don’t mean to sound like it was all miserable, but the famous quote that comes to mind is “Adventure is adversity in retrospect.” and we would not have had as amazing highs if our trip were easy. We actually might do it again when our son is old enough to appreciate it. I can think of few better ways to educate a kid in many diverse areas than sailing on your own boat to other countries. I hope we’re able to make it happen someday in the next decade.

Matt Heusser: How has the trip impacted your tech career? What do employers think about the trip?

Adam Yuret: The trip was the very best thing I ever did to my career. I agonized over it for a long time before we left. Here I am making a very nice living with no paper credentials. I literally had no idea if I’d be flipping burgers when we got back. In truth I was in a trap where I was working. While I was head-down trying to figure out a way to get our team out of the waterfall process of ad-hoc testing, endless death-march crunch modes testing things nobody really understood a whole community of practice was advancing the field of testing. I was asking why testers can’t be involved in the designer process years before I’d heard of ATDD. When we came back our first time I ended up taking my old job back but before my old employer made me an offer I had a series of interviews with an exciting new company in Beaverton Oregon who wanted me to start their first testing team. During my interview with their CFO the topic of my trip came up. My policy is not to talk about our trip because many people might not care about the details or may not relate but this guy pressed me. After the third time he asked me for more specifics I explained what we did in detail. He said “Wow, you seriously sailed a little broken boat with just your wife as crew thousands of miles down the Pacific coast to Mexico? I couldn’t be more impressed if you’d told me you were one of those elite Submarine jockeys!” I didn’t really know what he meant by that but I gathered that he wasn’t put off by it and they tried very hard to hire me. After I turned them down (because I felt wrong taking a position that required long term commitment) they all worked late on a Friday night to try and make me a more appealing offer. I was really flattered by them and we seriously considered canceling leg 2 of our trip so I could go work for them. Ultimately we agreed that we were committed to finishing what we started.

Anyway, while we were out the 2nd time we met a couple of people our age who were also in the business (this is very rare as most people out there are retired and over 60) two boats, actually. One of them told us to give Seattle a try when we were done instead of returning to Portland. This idea appealed to me a great deal. On one hand I’d be leaving my professional network behind. Oh the other hand, I didn’t want to go back to the place I was for so long, nor did I want to go to a culturally similar place. Moving to Seattle meant knowing nobody, I’d have to count on myself to get a job there and meet new people. Those friends on that Seattle boat sweetened the deal by offering to let us live on their boat in Seattle while they went on their 3 month honeymoon. So the cost of moving to Seattle was zero. We went for it and the first job interview I had was with Jon Bach. Jon and his brother introduced me to a whole new world of testing I never knew existed. I had my first test audition at Quardev with Jacob Stevens who called Jon in to meet me afterwards. Jon continued the audition and much to my surprise showed me that I actually knew what I was doing. It turned out I had a marketable skill I didn’t really knew existed to that point.

I attended my first professional conference ever, CAST 2011, the year after we moved to Seattle, as a speaker. Since then I have presented at Lean Camp, and STPcon in Dallas. I can say with a large degree of confidence that had we not quit our lives and gone sailing I’d probably still be an individual contributor (or worse still a manager) at that company in Portland. I now enjoy being part of a large community of passionate technologists in not only the testing space but in management, leadership, and consulting.

Matt Heusser: What have you been doing, IT-wise, for the past few years — and what’s next for Adam?

This pic is called, and I am not kidding, weird fog in San Carlos.

Adam Yuret: I still work for Volunteermatch but I’ll be wrapping that up at the end of January. It’s been a great run and I’ve learned a lot and even taught some things. One of the things I taught is that in order to have an open collaborative agile team, you need to be co-located. So they’re going to move the position in-house and since I have no interest in moving my family to the bay area I’ll be moving on to new things. I am discussing some internal coaching opportunities here in Seattle and considering going into business as a management consultant/agile coach with a deep testing background.

Honestly I have no idea what the next year will bring but something about selling everything and going to sea on a broken boat has a way of making you not sweat the little things. I am crazy-excited for the next chapter in my career.

Matt Heusser: Thank you for being so open, honest, and free with your time, Adam. I am sure the readers appreciate it.